Katherine Freeman

Katherine Freeman

Penn State will soon be home to an accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) that will allow researchers all over the country to do high-precision carbon dating to address questions about Earth's past and present. The new instrument will be able to determine the age of samples from the past 10,000 years within 15 to 20 years and will be used by scientists from across the nation.

A series of rapid environmental changes in East Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University.

"The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years," said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years."

Organic acids — including acetic acid, commonly known as vinegar — are routinely found in water that is pumped from underground oil reservoirs. Exactly how these acids relate to the generation of petroleum isn't altogether clear; but oil companies have long suspected that if the acids were properly analyzed, they could yield useful clues about the petroleum "systems" from which they are drawn.

They can't talk. They're not measurably intelligent. They can't even move on their own. Yet Katherine Freeman of Penn State University's geosciences department has been learning something from common marine algae.

"We're trying to look back in time," says Freeman, "to see if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher when the temperature was higher." By understanding Earth's ancient atmosphere, scientists hope to predict the consequences of modern-day greenhouse gas emissions.

They can't talk. They're not measurably intelligent. They can't even move on their own. Yet Katherine Freeman of Penn State University's geosciences department has been learning something from common marine algae.

"We're trying to look back in time," says Freeman, "to see if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher when the temperature was higher." By understanding Earth's ancient atmosphere, scientists hope to predict the consequences of modern-day greenhouse gas emissions.